Friday, October 07, 2011

Scientists and Poets

Scientists and poets are very different. Yes, it's true that some scientists are poets but when it comes to real scientific debates poetry is a poor excuse for science.

Unless, of course, you're an evolutionary psychologist. Evolutionary psychologists seem to be quite incapable of recognizing real scientific problems with their just-so stories. Instead, they fall back on a tactic that's much more common in modern humanities departments. They attack presumed motives and misconceptions.1

Jesse Marczyk of Pop Psychology is a defender of evolutionary psychology. He posted a poem on the thread: Boobies, Blue-footed And Otherwise. Instead of actually dealing with the science behind the study he assumes that all criticism of evolutionary psychology comes from people who don't understand the difference between "is" and "ought" and who don't understand that genes can influence behavior.

Unfortunately, this sort of response is all too typical of the mindset of evolutionary psychologists. Isn't there a single evolutionary psychologist who can behave like a scientist instead of like Rudyard Kipling?

When silly critics of evolutionary psych
Tell the world these studies are like
Excuses for misogyny
And evil behavior apology
Threatening to bring back Third Reich,

Those critics will proclaim,
“Those who rape and maim
Will turn to our field
For a convenient shield
In order to avoid any blame”

When the topic under discussion gets heated
The misunderstandings are always repeated
“Genes don’t determine behavior”
Is always their savior
Despite this point long being defeated

Their sense of self-satisfaction
Persists without any retraction,
Admission of fallibility,
Lack of civility,
Or awareness of any infraction

It would seem their moral outrage
Has left them biased and unable to gauge
Accurately the research they hope to dismiss
Leaving them only to curse and to hiss
In a manner unbefitting a sage.

These critiques are quite the bore,
and we’ve all heard this shit before.
We’re left only to shake our fist,
As they seem persist
Not unlike an academic cold sore.

1. The term "post-modernism" is much abused but that's what I'm thinking

7 comments:

Mr. Moran, you keep on complaining that assertions in evolutionary psychology lack evidence. However you surely appreciate that evo psych is not like physics, chemistry or even evo biol where more or less direct evidence is available. Evo psych faces a particular challenge because you are trying to draw conclusions about past human behavioral traits for which little or no material evidence is available. Since this state of affairs will likely always persist, what would you say would be satisfactory AND easily obtainable evidence that would convince you about some of these assertions? If there is no such evidence that you think could directly validate evo psych's assertions, do you think evo psych will never become an actual science? If so, do you think all evolutionary psychologists should just give up studying this discipline?

However you surely appreciate that evo psych is not like physics, chemistry or even evo biol where more or less direct evidence is available.

I disagree. Surely there can be evidence that a particular set of alleles predisposes men to beat their wives under certain circumstances?

Surely there can be evidence that all, or most, modern men possess those alleles? (i.e. selection)

Can we never find evidence that the behavior is adaptive?

Can we look at modern hunter-gatherer societies to see if wife beating (under certain circumstances) is common?

Modern genetics has identified many loci that appear to have been recently selected. Are any of them involved in behavior?

We know a lot about population genetics. Why can't evolutionary psychologists assign probable selection coefficients to their presumed adaptations and show us how they could have become fixed in a scattered population of small hunter-gatherer groups?

There's a ton of work being done on presumed adaptations in the hominid lineage and all of it qualifies as science. Evidence is gathered and presented and subjected to the intense scrutiny of colleagues who are knowledgeable about evolution.

Correction ... not quite all of it. Evolutionary psychology is a notable exception. Why is that?

What's different about the alleles for skin color, lactose intolerance, ability to speak, and blood types? Why do we demand scientific evidence for the adaptive value of those alleles but not the alleles of the evolutionary psychologists?

... do you think all evolutionary psychologists should just give up studying this discipline?

I think the discipline has been so discredited that it can't be saved. If real scientists want to study the evolution of human behavior then they are going to have to come up with a new name for their discipline and they are going to have to enforce rigorous scientific standards to eliminate the non-scientists.

Moran: "If real scientists want to study the evolution of human behavior then they are going to have to come up with a new name for their discipline and they are going to have to enforce rigorous scientific standards to eliminate the non-scientists."

The name for this is neurogenetics.

Moran: "Modern genetics has identified many loci that appear to have been recently selected. Are any of them involved in behavior?"

"Evo psych faces a particular challenge because you are trying to draw conclusions about past human behavioral traits for which little or no material evidence is available. "

One word calls attention to this whiny bullshit: genetics.

The great sin of evo psycho is over-reach. The field seems unwilling to gather the hard evidence in support its wild hypotheses--it's stuck in sci-fi phase. For that would require doing evolutionary functional genomics (or something like that), which is time consuming and costly.

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Principles of Biochemistry 5th edition

Disclaimer

Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

Superstition

Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerlyseemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.

Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.

The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.

The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.